olive garden is our only hope

I hope you all have had a restful holiday season and happy new year!

In response to my last post about the gym, one of my subscribers asked, “[This post] Makes me wonder if there's an opportunity to bring (return?) the social connectedness that has been privatized in gyms and country clubs to the commons.”

I thought this was a very astute comment and it gets at the heart of what I’ve been thinking about these days with regards to civic infrastructure. The comment acknowledges that fancy gyms, for all the social benefits they provide their members, are lacking something because of their exclusivity. It raises the question of whether it’s possible to cultivate “social connectedness” in a new way - a way that cuts across class. In other words, what can democratic space look like?

As I mulled these questions over in my head this holiday break, I remembered a paper my friend in grad school sent me called “Rubbing Shoulders”. This study uses cell phone location data to identify places where people from high and low income groups mix, and found that full-service chain restaurants, such as Applebee’s and Olive Garden, produced the highest levels of social mixing.

According to this paper, these chain restaurants provided even higher levels of mixing when compared to more civically-oriented spaces such as libraries, churches, and parks. The authors cite high levels of residential segregation and the local nature of civic institutions as the reason for this discrepancy. If you go to the library in your neighborhood and your neighborhood is not income-mixed, then the library won’t be either.

So what do we do with this information? Do we hail Applebee’s as the savior of American democracy? Or do we panic? If Olive Garden is the linchpin of social integration does that mean America is basically the Titanic going down in a giant vat of Alfredo?

I’ll start by giving props where props are due: these restaurants have earned their broad appeal by offering a sit-down meal at an affordable price. They are family friendly, accessible, and provide an experience that is fun and fast. It’s not a surprise that people from across income brackets are willing to travel to them.

But I would be hard-pressed to argue that the quality of civic engagement is high at Olive Garden, even if the quantity of cross-class interactions is. I wouldn’t say that chain restaurants are necessarily the contemporary intellectual salon, but they offer us a meaningful guide to what kinds of spaces draw Americans across income ranges.

I also encourage us to consider the fact that the authors found that our traditional civic institutions, such as churches and libraries, did not generate cross-income mixing. To me, their finding that residential segregation, which has been increasing since the 1970s, is undermining the integrative potential of existing civic institutions, exposes the way that different types of segregation influence and compound with each other.

From a policy design perspective, I have two takeaways. First, if we are to design spaces to attract people from different income groups, we can learn from the chain restaurants that are already doing this by offering something affordable, accessible, and worth traveling for. Second, if we want to leverage the power of our existing civic institutions to bring people together, we have to think about what kind of interventions can create neighborhoods with housing opportunities for people of all income levels.

Until then, see you at Olive Garden!

Bennett

City Speak #38